“The daffodil!” she repeated in frank amazement; she was completely surprised, and for once she did not attempt to hide it.

“Yes,” Rawson-Clew said; “why did you call it ‘The Good Comrade?’”

Julia began to recover herself and also her natural caution.  This was not the question she expected, but the rogue in her made her wary even of the seemingly simple and safe.  “I called it after three friends,” she said, “who were good comrades to me—­you, Johnny and Joost Van Heigen.  Why do you ask?”

“Because I wondered if it was a case of telepathy; I also named something ‘The Good Comrade.’”

“You?” she said.  “What did you name?  Was it a dog?”

“No, a bottle—­small, wide-necked, stopper fastened with a piece of torn handkerchief, about two-thirds full of a white powder!”

Julia had begun washing the cups; she did her best to betray no sign, and really she did it very well; her eyelids flickered a little and her breath came rather quickly, nothing more.

“Why did you name it?” she asked.  “It is rather odd to do so, isn’t it?”

“I named it after the person who gave it to me.”

Julia’s breath came a little quicker; she forgot to remark that the same reason had helped her in naming her flower; she was busy asking herself if he meant her by the good comrade.

“Perhaps I did not exactly name my bottle,” he went on to say, “but it stood for the person to me.  It was a sort of physical manifestation—­rather a grotesque one, perhaps—­of a spiritual presence which had not really left me since a certain sunny morning last year.”

“That is very interesting,” Julia managed to say; her native caution had not misled her; the innocently beginning talk had taken a devious way to the expected end.

“It was interesting,” Rawson-Clew said, “but not quite satisfying, at least not to the natural man.  He is not content with a manifestation any more than with a spiritual presence; he wants a corporal fact.”

Julia looked up; the talk was taking an unforseen turn that she did not quite follow, so she looked up.  And then she read something in his face that set her heart beating, that made her afraid, less perhaps of him than of herself, and the thrill that ran like fire through her body.

“I don’t quite understand,” she said, and dropped a cup.

It was meant to fall on the flagged floor and break; it would create a diversion, and picking up the pieces would give her time to get used to the suffocating heart-beats.  She had enough of the Polkington self-mastery left to think of the manoeuvre and its advisability, but not enough to carry it out properly; the cup fell on the doubled-up tea-cloth that lay at her feet and was not broken at all.  Nevertheless the incident and her own contempt for her failure steadied her a little.

Rawson-Clew picked up the cup.  “Do you not understand,” he said.  “It is quite simple; I have put it to you before, too—­not in the same words, but it comes to the same—­the plain terms used then were—­will you do me the honour of becoming my wife?”